Defend Chelsea Manning

Here are two important ways you can support Chelsea:

Attorneys Nancy Hollander and
Vincent Ward are well into the process of preparing for Chelsea's first legal appeal next
year. The appeals process has the potential to take decades off Chelsea's 35 year prison sentence.Donate Today!

Super secret insider info: Not only are Chelsea Manning shirts and stuff already 50% off in our online store, if you use discount code "chelsea"
during check out, you'll get an additional 50% off. That is insane, so
please don't tell anyone else, as we can't afford for this news to get
out too broadly. Here's the link to the store, just for you Bonnie.

Chelsea honored in Advocate's 40 under 40!

"In blogs, tweets, and handwritten letters from prison, the former Army
intelligence specialist is still trying to change the world."

"I often hear and read that many people all over the world consider me a
‘whistleblower’ or a ‘heroine.’ This experience can be a little
intimidating at times," she tells The Advocate. "That’s an idea
that would be a lot to live up to! I don’t feel like I can live up to
the expectations of being a ‘heroine.’ I don’t have any special powers
or abilities like a comic book super hero. I actually feel a lot more
vulnerable than that. In fact, I am very vulnerable. I just try to be
myself, and that’s all I aspire to be.” Read more...

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea's legal fees!

When Drone Whistleblowers are Under Attack,

What Do We Do?

STAND UP, FIGHT BACK!

We honor Stephan, Michael, Brandon and Cian!

These
four former ex-drone pilots have courageously spoken out publicly
against the U.S. drone assassination program. They have not been
charged with any crime, yet the U.S. government is retaliating against
these truth-tellers by freezing all of their bank and credit card
accounts. WE MUST BACK THEM UP!
Listen to them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43z6EMy8T28

PLEASE HELP THEM:

1. Sign up on this support network:www.facebook.com/events/1502272456740302/

**************************************************************
Statement of Support for Drone Whistleblowers
(Code Pink Women for Peace: East Bay, Golden Gate, and S.F. Chapters 11.28.15)

Code
Pink Women for Peace support the very courageous actions of four former
US drone operators, Michael Haas, Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland,
and Stephan Lewis, who have come under increasing attack for disclosing
information about “widespread corruption and institutionalized
indifference to civilian casualties that characterize the drone
program.” As truth tellers, they stated in a public letter to President
Obama that the killing of innocent civilians has been one of the most
“devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the
world.”* These public disclosures come only after repeated attempts to
work privately within official channels failed.

Despite
the fact that none of the four has been charged with criminal activity,
all had their bank accounts and credit cards frozen. This retaliatory
response by our government is consistent with the extrajudicial nature
of US drone strikes.

We must support these former drone
operators who have taken great risks to stop the drone killing. Write
or call your US Senators, your US Representatives, President Barack
Obama, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, and CIA Director John Brennan
demanding that Michael Haas, Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland, and
Stephan Lewis be applauded, not punished, for revealing the criminal and
extrajudicial nature of drone strikes that has led to so many civilian
deaths.

For more information on the 4 Drone Whistleblowers:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1502272456740302/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43z6EMy8T28
(Must see Democracy Now interview with the 4 drone operators)

Save Ashraf Fayadh

Palestinian poet sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia.

Ashraf
Fayadh, Palestinian refugee poet and artist living in Saudi Arabia, has
been sentenced to death by a Saudi court, on charges of apostasy or
abandoning his faith in Islam. The charges appear to be based on his
poetry and writing and also maybe a form of retaliation for posting an
online video showing Saudi religious police lashing a man in public.

Fayadh
is a Palestinian refugee who was born in Saudi Arabia and has become a
leading member of the young Saudi art scene. He was arrested in January
2014, his identity documents confiscated, and held for a lengthy period
without charge. He was then sentenced to four years in prison and 800
lashes; after he appealed; he was re-tried last month and sentenced to
death. He did not have legal representation.

Fayadh is being
sentenced to death after having been jailed for more than 22 months in
the Saudi city of Abha without clear legal charges beyond “insulting the
Godly self” and having “ideas that do not suit the Saudi society.”
These charges are based on the complaint of a reader’s interpretation of
Fayadh's 2008 poetry collection titled, Instructions Within.

“According
to Fayadh’s friends, when the police failed to prove that his poetry
was atheist propaganda, they began berating him for smoking and having
long hair,” reported the Guardian. Fayadh said his poetry book,
Instructions Within, is “just about me being [a] Palestinian
refugee…about cultural and philosophical issues. But the religious
extremists explained it as destructive ideas against God.”

This
is not the first time that Saudi authorities have arrested Ashraf
Fayadh. The poet was detained before after a Saudi citizen filed a
complaint with the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the
Prevention of Vice accusing Fayadh of having “misguided and misguiding
thoughts.” Fayadh was bailed out of jail at the time, only to get
arrested again. According to sources close to Fayadh, the poet has been
denied both visitation and legal representation rights.

Amnesty
international stated, “We condemn these acts of intimidation targeting
Ashraf Fayadh as part of a wider campaign inciting hate against writers
and using Islam to justify oppression and to crush free speech. We
express our solidarity with Fayadh, hoping to increase support for the
poet as well as pressure to release him. Our efforts should come
together to ensure the proliferation of free speech and personal
freedoms. We specifically call on Saudi intellectuals to express
solidarity with Fayadh against Takfiris’ intimidation practices meant to
silence poets, writers, and artists like him. Let the flag of
creativity fly free and remain innovative. Remaining silent towards
Fayadh’s detention is an insult to knowledge, literature, culture, and
thought as well as to freedom and human rights.”

Samidoun
Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network joins the call for the immediate
freedom of Ashraf Fayadh. His imprisonment, persecution and death
sentence by the Saudi regime reflects the deeply reactionary and
far-right role played by the Saudi regime in the region—alongside its
close imperial partners in the United States, Canada and Europe—that
threatens Palestinian and Arab culture, life, and movements and works to
block and suppress any struggle for liberation.

2.
Protest at the Saudi Embassy in your area for freedom for Ashraf
Fayadh. Print signs and materials, and gather outside the Saudi embassy
with Palestine rights activists, artists and others to demand his
freedom. See the list of Saudi embassies here: http://embassy.goabroad.com/embassies-of/saudi-arabia

3.
Contact your government officials. The Saudi regime is a close partner
of the United States, Canadian and various European governments. Demand
that your government pressure the Saudi regime to release Fayadh. In
Canada, Call the office of the Foreign Minister, Stéphane Dion, at
613-996-5789 and demand Canada pressure Saudi Arabia to release Fayadh,
or email: stephane.dion@parl.gc.ca.
In the U.S., call the White House (202-456-1111) and the U.S. State
Department (202-647-9572); demand the U.S. pressure Saudi Arabia to
release Fayadh. In the EU, contact your Member of the European
Parliament—you can find your MEP here:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/map.html

Please
also write letters, Facebook posts, emails or send Facebook messages to
your local politicians, newspapers and friends to publicize this dire
case and spread the information about the situation of Ashraf Fayadh.

Urge
Gov. Jerry Brown to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence. Cooper has
always maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder of which
he was convicted. In 2009, five federal judges signed a dissenting
opinion warning that the State of California "may be about to execute
an innocent man." Having exhausted his appeals in the US courts, Kevin
Cooper's lawyers have turned to the Inter American Commission on Human
Rights to seek remedy for what they maintain is his wrongful
conviction, and the inadequate trial representation, prosecutorial
misconduct and racial discrimination which have marked the case.
Amnesty International opposes all executions, unconditionally.

"The
State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." - Judge
William A. Fletcher, 2009 dissenting opinion on Kevin Cooper's case

Kevin Cooper has been on death row in California for more than thirty years.

In
1985, Cooper was convicted of the murder of a family and their house
guest in Chino Hills. Sentenced to death, Cooper's trial took place in
an atmosphere of racial hatred — for example, an effigy of a monkey in a
noose with a sign reading "Hang the N*****!" was hung outside the
venue of his preliminary hearing.

Take action to see that Kevin Cooper's death sentence is commuted immediately.

Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence.

Following
his trial, five federal judges said: "There is no way to say this
politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing."

Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.

Tell California authorities: The death penalty carries the risk of irrevocable error. Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted.

In
2009, Cooper came just eight hours shy of being executed for a crime
that he may not have committed. Stand with me today in reminding the
state of California that the death penalty is irreversible — Kevin
Cooper's sentence must be commuted immediately.

Kevin
Cooper's case will be the subject of a new episode of CNN's "Death Row
Stories" airing on Sunday, July 26 at 7 p.m. PDT. The program will be
repeated at 10 p.m. PDT. The episode, created by executive producers
Robert Redford and Alex Gibney, will explore how Kevin Cooper was framed
by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department and District
Attorney.Viewers on the east coast can see the program at 10 p.m. EDT
and it will be rebroadcast at 1 a.m. EDT on July 27. Viewers in the
Central Time zone can see it at 9 p.m. and midnight CDT. Viewers in the
Mountain Time zone can see it at 8 p.m. and ll p.m MDT. It will be
aired on CNN again during the following week and will also be able to
be viewed on CNN's "Death Row Stories" website.

Kevin Cooper: An Innocent Victim of Racist Frame-Up - from the Fact Sheet at: www.freekevincooper.org
Kevin
Cooper is an African-American man who was wrongly convicted and
sentenced to death in 1985 for the gruesome murders of a white family in
Chino Hills, California: Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter
Jessica and their house- guest Christopher Hughes. The Ryens' 8 year
old son Josh, also attacked, was left for dead but survived.

Convicted
in an atmosphere of racial hatred in San Bernardino County CA, Kevin
Cooper remains under a threat of imminent execution in San Quentin. He
has never received a fair hearing on his claim of innocence. In a
dissenting opinion in 2009, five federal judges of the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals signed a 82 page dissenting opinion that begins: "The
State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." 565 F.3d
581.

There is significant evidence that exonerates Mr. Cooper and points toward other suspects:


The coroner who investigated the Ryen murders concluded that the
murders took four minutes at most and that the murder weapons were a
hatchet, a long knife, an ice pick and perhaps a second knife. How could
a single person, in four or fewer minutes, wield three or four
weapons, and inflict over 140 wounds on five people, two of whom were
adults (including a 200 pound ex-marine) who had loaded weapons near
their bedsides?

 The sole surviving victim of the
murders, Josh Ryen, told police and hospital staff within hours of the
murders that the culprits were "three white men." Josh Ryen repeated
this statement in the days following the crimes. When he twice saw Mr.
Cooper's picture on TV as the suspected attacker, Josh Ryen said
"that's not the man who did it."

 Josh Ryen's
description of the killers was corroborated by two witnesses who were
driving near the Ryens' home the night of the murders. They reported
seeing three white men in a station wagon matching the description of
the Ryens' car speeding away from the direction of the Ryens' home.


These descriptions were corroborated by testimony of several employees
and patrons of a bar close to the Ryens' home, who saw three white men
enter the bar around midnight the night of the murders, two of whom
were covered in blood, and one of whom was wearing coveralls.


The identity of the real killers was further corroborated by a woman
who, shortly after the murders were discovered, alerted the sheriff's
department that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, left
blood-spattered coveralls at her home the night of the murders. She also
reported that her boyfriend had been wearing a tan t-shirt matching a
tan t-shirt with Doug Ryen's blood on it recovered near the bar. She
also reported that her boyfriend owned a hatchet matching the one
recovered near the scene of the crime, which she noted was missing in
the days following the murders; it never reappeared; further, her sister
saw that boyfriend and two other white men in a vehicle that could
have been the Ryens' car on the night of the murders.

Lacking
a motive to ascribe to Mr. Cooper for the crimes, the prosecution
claimed that Mr. Cooper, who had earlier walked away from custody at a
minimum security prison, stole the Ryens' car to escape to Mexico. But
the Ryens had left the keys in both their cars (which were parked in the
driveway), so there was no need to kill them to steal their car. The
prosecution also claimed that Mr. Cooper needed money, but money and
credit cards were found untouched and in plain sight at the murder
scene.

The jury in 1985 deliberated for seven days
before finding Mr. Cooper guilty. One juror later said that if there had
been one less piece of evidence, the jury would not have voted to
convict.

The evidence the prosecution presented at
trial tying Mr. Cooper to the crime scene has all been
discredited… (Continue reading this document at:
http://www.savekevincooper.org/_new_freekevincooperdotorg/TEST/Scripts/DataLibraries/upload/KC_FactSheet_2014.pdf)

This message from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. July 2015

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

For Immediate Release – Thursday, October 29, 2015

Solitary Prisoners' Lawyers Slam CDCR for Sleep Deprivation

Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition

SAN
FRANCISCO – Yesterday, lawyers for prisoners in the class action case
Ashker v. Brown submitted a letter condemning Pelican Bay prison
guards' "wellness checks," which have widely been viewed as sleep
deprivation. The letter was submitted to United States Magistrate Judge
Nandor Vadas, and calls on the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to put an end to the checks.

Last
month, prisoners achieved a historic victory in the settlement of
Ashker v. Brown where the indefinite long term solitary confinement was
effectively ended in California, with Magistrate Judge Vadas currently
monitoring implementation of the settlement terms.

The
guards at Pelican bay Security Housing Units have been conducting
disruptive cell checks every 30 minutes around the clock for three
months, causing prisoners widespread sleep disruption. The process is
loud and according to prisoners, "the method and noise from the checks
is torture."

Attorneys representing Pelican Bay SHU
prisoners have just completed extensive interviews with prisoners who
demand that "the every 30-minute checks have to be stopped or people
are going to get sick or worse." In addition, they report that regular
prison programs have been negatively impacted.

"To
sleep is a fundamental human right," said Anne Weills, a member of the
prisoners' legal team and one of the attorneys who conducted the
interviews with prisoners in Pelican Bay. "To take away such a basic
human right amounts to severe torture, adding to the already torturous
conditions of being in solitary confinement."

Most
prisoners report low energy, exhaustion and fatigue. Most state that
they have trouble concentrating. They try to read, but they nod off
and/or can't remember what they have read. Their writing is much slower
("I can't think to write"), and describe the constant welfare checks as
having a negative impact on their mental state.

While
this recent attorney survey was specifically focusing on sleep
deprivation and its effects, prisoners volunteered information about
the negative impact of these frequent checks: yard policy and practice
has reduced access to recreation, access to showers has been reduced,
programs and meals are being delayed, and property for those newly
transferred to Pelican Bay is still being delayed and withheld.

Sleep
deprivation constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Prisoners and
their attorneys are demanding that these checks be halted.

Free Albert Woodfox!

On
June 8, 2015 a federal judge granted Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox
unconditional release. Albert's conviction had already been overturned
three times - most recently in 2013 - yet every time the state has
appealed.

Today, Albert is still behind
bars after spending four decades in cruel, unjust solitary confinement.
He believes that he and fellow prisoners, Herman Wallace and Robert
King, were first placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for their
activism. All three men were members of the Black Panther Party.
Together, they came to be known as the Angola 3.

It is
time for the State of Louisiana to stop standing in the way of justice.
Call on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to ensure Albert's cruel and
unjust confinement is not his legacy. Learn more

Amnesty for all those arrested demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Amnesty for ALL those arresteddemanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Sign and distribute the petition to drop the charges!Spread this effort with #Amnesty4Baltimore

"A riot is the language of the unheard" — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

An
estimated 300 people have been arrested in Baltimore in the last two
weeks. Many have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in
the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested
include journalists, medics and legal observers.

One
individual arrested for property destruction of a police vehicle is
now facing life in prison and is being held on $500,000 bail. That's
$150,000 more than the officer charged with the murder of Freddie Gray.

The legal system has made it clear that they care more about
broken windows than broken necks; more about a CVS than the lives of
Baltimore's Black residents.

They showed no hesitation in
arresting Baltimore's protesters and rebels, and sending in the
National Guard, but took 19 days to put a single one of the killer cops
in handcuffs. This was the outrageous double standard that led to the
Baltimore Uprising.

I
stand in solidarity with those in Baltimore who are demanding that all
charges be dropped against those who rose up against racism, police
brutality, oppressive social conditions and delay of justice in the case
of Freddie Gray. The whole world now recognizes that were it not for
this powerful grassroots movement, in all its forms, there would be no
indictment.

It is an outrage that peaceful
protesters have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in
the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested
include journalists and legal observers.

Even the youth
who are charged with property destruction and looting should be given
an amnesty. There is no reason a teenager -- provoked by racists and
justifiably angry -- should be facing life in prison for breaking the
windows of a police car.

The City of Baltimore should
work to rectify the conditions that led to this Uprising, rather than
criminalizing those who took action in response to those conditions.
Drop the charges now!

Day
Two of "Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes" had fireworks equal to the opening round
on Friday. The arguments for a Preliminary Injunction continued before
the U.S. District Court in Scranton, Pennsylvania.It
was a day of dueling doctors, admissions, explosive documents, and
first hand testimony, which debated the constitutional right to
healthcare while in prison. The question: does Mumia Abu-Jamal receive
life saving new anti viral drugs that cure Hepatitis C? Or will Judge
Robert Mariani's federal court allow the Department of Corrections in
Pennsylvania to deny any treatment for chronic Hepatitis C - and
maintain (a just revealed protocol) that calls for "denying care" and
"monitoring imates" while the virus ravages the body causing
irreversible organ damage.

The morning featured vigorous
cross examination. Dr. Joseph Harris, deftly handled Department of
Corrections cross, emphasizing this key point: the cure for Hep C is
clearly the medical standard of care. And denial of treatment is no
treatment for a progressive and infectious disease.

In a last
minute addition to the witness list the DOC questioned dermatologist Dr.
Schleicher who first treated Mumia's devasting skin condition in Feb.
of 2015. The Department of Corrections through this expert
unconvincingly asserted that Mumia's skin condition was unrelated to
Hepatitis C, and that his low platelet counts, anemia of chronic
disease, abnormal liver function tests, are not caused by Hep C.

At
12:10 of the hearing a withering cross exam by Robert Boyle (Attorney
for Abu-Jamal) exposed Schleicher's limited diagnostic acumen, his
failure to monitor Mumia's two hospital ICU admissions and the
illuiminating fact that he did not follow up on Geisinger Medical
Center's recommendation in May for an Hep C viral load test. He got him
to admit that "he did not know much about Hep C". Schleicher has
continued to treat Mumia, and it was revealed was unaware that the
infectious disease specialist hired by the department of Corrections,
Dr. Ramon Gadea, had recommended on September 9th treatment for
Hepatitis C in response to Mumia's ongoing ravaged skin. Notably, Dr.
Gadea and the onsite doctors at SCI Mahanoy who see Mumia in the
infirmary on a weekly basis were not called to testify. It can be
presumed that their testimony would have been unfavorable to the DOC. Standing Up for MumiaThe
mid afternoon featured Dr. Suzanne Ross and Dr. Johanna Fernandez. The
value of these two frequent and long term visitors to Mumia was in the
compelling details that they provided describing Mumia's injuries, acute
sysmptoms, and deteriorating health. Some examples from the acute
period of symptoms in the spring and summer included Mumia's slurred
words, elephant skin, scales and bloody cracks in his skin on 90% of his
body, extreme weakness, swelling of his limbs, and loss of mental
acuity. When cross-exmamined both Ross and Fernandez were unapologetic,
as they expounded on Mumia's innocence, unjust incarceration, and the
state's naked attempts to silence him.

As those who know Mumia
personally realize, the man just does not complain, and is frankly
unable to describe his own vulnerablity. As such, this testimony was
key. Present through video streaming throughout the proceedings Mumia
was, as Dr. Fernandez testified is part of his character, simply stoic.
Before this devastating health crisis, there were only a handful of
occasions that he has gone to sick call during 34 years of
incarceration. This might be surprising for a man who is known to the
world as a writer and eloquent pubic commentator.

Key Evidence ExposedIn
an explosive revelation: Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center,
dissected the testimony of DOC defense witness infirmary administrator,
Mr. Steinhart - revealing that there is a written Hep C treatment
protocol that was developed this year. Grote appealed to the judge, and
he required that the DOC immediately produce a copy of the document.
Laura Neal, DOC counsel quickly tried to surpress the public release of
the document, calling for it to remain under seal. Overheard in the
courtroom, DOC associate defense counsel noted that they did not want
this document available publically because it would increase the
department's liability in the class action pending for inmate Hep C
treatment. Debate continues Wed morning on whether this document will
be sealed. A Right To Know request by Prison Radio requesting the
document was filed with the state during break requested by the judge so
he could read the protocol

The doctors and lawyers that enforce the PA Department of Corrections policy have got a problem. Healthcare
is a constitutional right, even for those who are incarcerated.
Proving that the DOC has been "deliberately indifferent" the required
standard for a preliminary injunction and relief in this case clearly
has been met by Abu-Jamal's attorneys.

Americans
now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that
money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing
burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.

I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.

Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson
Updates from the New "Team Free Lorenzo Johnson":
Thank
you all for your relentless effort in the fight against wrongful
convictions and your determination to stand behind Lorenzo.

To
garner even more support for Lorenzo Johnson, we have been hard at
work updating the website and developing an even more formidable and
dedicated team. Please take a moment to visit the new site here.

During
the month of July, Lorenzo wrote two new articles for The Huffington
Post titled "When Prosecutors Deny Justice for the Innocent," and "Hurry
Up and Wait for Justice: The Struggle of Innocent Prisoners." In these
articles, Lorenzo discusses the flaws in the criminal justice system,
which he deems is a "serious problem in this country."

Lastly, Lorenzo has a message to you all.

A Letter from Lorenzo:

July 23, 2015
Dauphin County Prison
Harrisburg, PA

Dear Supporters,

I
hope all is well with everyone and your families. As for myself, I'm
still on my journey in pursuit of my vindication. Sorry for my website
being shut down for a couple of weeks. It was being transferred to a new
provider and management. I'm back and will do my best to keep
everything up to speed with what's taking place.

I
would like to thank ALL of my loyal supporters in the U.S. and in the
MANY different counties that have signed on to support my innocence.
Thanks for all of the letters, emails, photos, etc. Like I always say, I
get energy to carry on and inspiration hearing form you, please stay
engaged in my struggle.

As of this moment, nothing has
changed, but – the continued delay tactics are constantly being used by
my prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General William Stoycos. With the
mounting of evidence that supports my innocence and police and
prosecution misconduct claims that is steadily piling up, you would
think that I would be having a couple of evidentiary hearings on my
actual innocence appeal that have been pending since August 5, 2013.

At
the time of this writing, I've been moved from SCI-Mahanoy to Dauphin
County Prison and locked down for 23 hours and 40 minutes a day. In the
20 minutes I get to come out, I get to take a shower and make a short
call. Prosecutor Stoycos had me moved so I can be a witness in his
attempt to have my codefendant Corey Walker's attorney removed from
representing him. How dare he call into question an attorney who is
seeking justice for her client, when prosecutor Stoycos himself violated
multiple constitutional rights of mine and Mr. Walker, that led to us
being in prison for 20 years and counting.

Prosecutor
Stoycos is continuously abusing his power and his endless resources he
has at his disposal. He is not tough on crime, he's tough on Innocent
Prisoners. Prosecutor Stoycos is doing everything in his power to
prevent justice from taking place. I encourage everyone to continue to
speak out against my nightmare, invite others to get involved by going
to my website and signing my Freedom Petition and whatever else they're
willing to do.

On a positive note, I just enrolled in
warehouse management trade and started on July 13th. Unfortunately,
you're only allowed to miss a couple of days and Prosecutor Stoycos had
me temporarily transferred on July 14th … It's extremely hard on Lifers
to get into these trades due to the fact that Lifers are placed at the
back of the list of ALL vocational classes. I try to further my
education every chance I get, so when I do come home, I will be
certified in different work.

The month of the hearing
has come and left, without me being brought to the courthouse … I'm one
of MANY innocent prisoners who endures this non-stop madness in our
pursuit of Justice and Freedom. Now that my webpage is almost caught up
to speed, I promise prompt updates and as everyone knows that contacted
me directly, I personally reply to those in the states and out of the
country. For those who can make a financial contribution, everything
counts. Take care and let's continue to fight until we achieve Freedom,
Justice, and Equality for all innocent prisoners.

"The Pain Within"

Free the Innocent
Lorenzo "Cat" Johnson

[Note: Lorenzo has since been transferred back to SCI Mahanoy and can be reached at his usual address.]

Thank
you all for reading this message and please take the time to visit the
new website and contribute to Lorenzo's campaign for freedom!

Email: Through JPay using the code:
Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC
or
Directly at LorenzoJohnson17932@gmail.com

Have a wonderful day!
- The Team to Free Lorenzo Johnson

freelorenzojohnson.org

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

Click HERE to view in browser

http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/

On
December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan
was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading
African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an
all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly
altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton
Harbor.

The prosecutor, with the judge's approval,
repeatedly told the jury "you don't need evidence to convict Mr.
Pinkney." And ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV.
PINKNEY TO THE 'ALTERED' PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led
away in handcuffs and thrown into Jackson Prison.

This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.

With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney's appeal.

Checks
can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community
Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney. Mail
them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI
49022.

Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.

For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search "Pinkney").

I
am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting
in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike
Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in
prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make
an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...)
ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I
arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred
people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people
recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the
prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2
days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on
the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this
racist."

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

Michigan
political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist
injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly
changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor
Mayor James Hightower.

No material or circumstantial
evidence was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the
purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County
activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization
(BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the
corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor,
Michigan.

In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an "Occupy the
PGA [Professional Golfers' Association of America]" demonstration
against a world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack
Nicklaus Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The
course was carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the
city of Benton Harbor decades ago.

Berrien County
officials were determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor
Hightower, who opposed a program that would have taxed local
corporations in order to create jobs and improve conditions in Benton
Harbor, a majority African-American municipality. Like other Michigan
cities, it has been devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment.

The
Benton Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent
charges to stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist
white officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black
city. Rev Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian
ministers do, was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper
column. This outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do
this again!

To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.

New Action--write letters to DoD officials requesting clemency for Chelsea!

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning's clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.

Please
write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks'
whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea
Manning's release from military prison.

It is
important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that
Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be
reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner,
imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely
that any of these individuals would independently move to release
Manning, a reduction in Manning's outrageous 35-year prison sentence is
a possibility at this stage.

The
letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and
especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning's
sentence is reduced. The letter should NOT be anti-military as this
will be unlikely to help.

A suggested message:
"Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military
regulations in the course of being true to her conscience. I urge you
to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning's sentence to time
served." Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the
details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.

Consider
composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this
yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This
clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning's upcoming appeal
before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning's
new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the
prosecution's—and the trial judge's—misconduct during last year's trial
at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea's legal fees at this critical stage!

Flint,
MI — After filing a FOIA request, a Virginia Tech professor recently
discovered Michigan state officials knew the city of Flint’s water
supply was giving children lead poisoning while falsely assuring
residents that the water was safe. Although the government had been
aware of the increased levels of lead poisoning since July, they
continued to lie to the public until a Flint pediatrician published a
study in September that found lead exposure in children had doubled
citywide and nearly tripled in high-risk areas.

Agreeing to
temporarily switch from Detroit’s water supply to the Flint River in
April 2014, residents in the city of Flint immediately noticed their tap
water appeared cloudy while emitting a pungent odor. After testing the
water supply on August 14, 2014, the Michigan Department of
Environmental Quality (MDEQ) discovered the water tested positive for fecal coliform bacteria,
also known as E. coli. Although the city issued several boil advisories
to kill the bacteria, the CDC has found that heating or boiling water
only increases the lead concentration in the water.

In an interview with Michigan Radio
on September 6, Virginia Tech Professor Marc Edwards warned that
preliminary tests revealed serious levels of lead in Flint’s water
supply. Refuting the university’s findings, MDEQ spokesman Brad Wurfel
stated, “The samples don’t match the testing that we’ve been doing in
the same kind of neighborhoods all over the city for the past year. With
these kind of numbers, we would have expected to be seeing a spike
somewhere else in the other lead monitoring that goes on in the
community.”

State officials continued telling the public that the
water supply was safe until a team of researchers led by Dr. Mona
Hanna-Attisha reported an alarming increase in childhood lead poisoning
later that month. But on Monday, Prof. Edwards revealed that government
officials had known the water supply was contaminated since July.
According to a series of memos and emails obtained through a FOIA
request, Edwards revealed the director of DHHS and the office of Gov.
Rick Snyder both received data between July and September documenting
the recent spike in kids suffering from lead poisoning.

According to the World Health Organization,
“lead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced
intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of
attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced
educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension,
renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive
organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to
be irreversible.”

Earlier this week, Edwards wrote, “After
missing warning signs of spiking childhood lead poisoning that occurred a
few months after switching to a corrosive river water source in 2014,
outside pressure forced officials at the Michigan Department of Health
and Human Services (DHHS) to closely scrutinize their data in July 2015.
They discovered scientifically conclusive evidence
of an anomalous increase in childhood lead poisoning in summer 2014
immediately after the switch in water sources, but stood by silently as
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) officials repeatedly
and falsely stated that no spike in blood lead levels (BLL) of children
had occurred.”

Although Flint finally reconnected to Detroit’s
water supply on October 16, Flint Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of
emergency on December 14. Referring to the contamination as a “manmade disaster,”
Mayor Weaver expressed concern that the increased levels of lead
poisoning in Flint’s children will result in “learning disabilities and
the need for special education and mental health services and an
increase in the juvenile justice system.”

Instead of keeping
children safe from toxic chemicals, Michigan officials repeatedly lied
about the safety of their drinking water even though they knew it was
poisoned. Last month, the parents of these children and other Flint
residents filed a class-action lawsuit against the governor and over a
dozen other public officials responsible for failing an entire city.
Unfortunately, no amount of money can compensate for the needless loss
of a child’s developmental abilities.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

The
Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office announced on Monday that a
Cleveland grand jury will not bring charges against either of the
officers involved in the fatal shooting of a 12-year-old boy by a
Cleveland police officer in November of 2014.

A grand jury for
weeks has been hearing testimony into the shooting of Tamir Rice within
seconds after police arrived at a park next to a Cleveland recreation
center in response to reports of a suspect with a gun. Rice died the
next day.

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty said at a press
conference on Monday that the shooting was "a perfect storm of human
error," but that it was "indisputable" that Rice appeared to be drawing a
gun from his waistband — even if it was a toy weapon.

"Simply
put, given this perfect storm of human error, mistakes and
miscommunications by all involved that day, the evidence did not
indicate criminal conduct by police," McGinty said.

The morning
of the shooting on November 22, 2014, officers were dispatched to
respond to a 911 call reporting someone who had been seen in the area
with a weapon. The caller noted that the weapon was "probably fake," but
the police dispatcher handling the call did not relay this last detail.

The
rookie officer who fired the shots at Rice, 27-year-old Timothy
Loehmann, said in a statement to the grand jury in December that he
believed his life was in danger at the time. Loehmann responded to the
park along with Officer Frank Garmbach — a 47-year-old police veteran
who was behind the wheel of the police cruiser and serving as Loehmann's
training officer.

In the statement, Loehmann said he assumed
Rice was roughly 18 years old and 185 pounds. He said that he saw Rice's
hand move toward his waist, and that he continued to yell "show me your
hands" as the officers approached the boy.

"I
was focused on the subject. Even when he was reaching into his
waistband, I didn't fire. I was yelling the command 'show me your
hands,'" Loehmann claimed.

The officer said he had very little
time as he exited his vehicle. Fearing that Rice was an active shooter
and that he and his partner were in danger, he discharged two fatal
shots.

Footage of the shooting shows that Loehmann drew and fired
his gun within two seconds of the patrol car pulling directly up to
Rice, leaving in doubt the number of times he could have shouted orders
to Rice, who was seemingly been given little chance to comply. Attorneys
for Rice's family have repeatedly denied the officers' claims that the
boy received sufficient warning before they opened fire.

In the
footage of the incident, Rice appears alone in a gazebo. It is unclear
why the officers did not stop the car some distance from Rice and use it
as cover as they identified themselves, rather than suddenly pull up
the car to within feet of him. Both officers declined to be interviewed
by investigators, but provided unsworn written testimony that was
presented to grand jurors on Tuesday.

After the shooting, four
minutes passed before an FBI agent responded to the scene and attempted
to administer first aid to Rice as the officers stood idly by.

The
grainy footage also shows cops rushing to restrain Rice's 14-year-old
sister as she attempted to check on her sibling. One officer pushed the
girl to the ground and handcuffed her as she screamed, "My baby brother,
they killed my baby brother," according to a lawsuit filed by Rice's
family.

In
response to that suit, the city issued a 41-page court filing claiming
that Rice was to blame for his own death because he failed to "avoid
injury."

McGinty's office released two reports from law
enforcement experts who said that the officers' actions during the
shooting were "reasonable," and a third report that provided a
frame-by-frame analysis of the surveillance video with notes detailing
how it appeared as though Rice was reaching for his waistband. Rice's
family questioned the validity of these reports and expressed outrage
over their release.

A lawyer for Rice's family issued a statement
on Monday expressing disappointment — but not surprise — with the grand
jury's decision. The family accused McGinty of "abusing and
manipulating the grand jury process to orchestrate a vote against
indictment," and said the way the prosecutor handled the case added to
their grief. They previously requested a special prosecutor, which was
denied.

The statement also urged any protesters rallying against the grand jury decision to do so "peacefully and democratically."

A federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the family against the two officers and the city of Cleveland is still pending.

PARIS — The European Union’s
struggle to deal with migration can be bluntly told in two numbers:
More than one million people have made their way to Europe this year, according to the International Organization for Migration,
and 190 have been formally relocated.The disparity is a potent reminder
of how migration has strained the European Union’s political will, its
unity and its resources.

People on the front lines of this
monumental undertaking are asking for patience. The question for the
European Union, which has pledged to relocate 160,000 people over the
next two years, is whether patience is enough.

“This is supposed
to pick up rapidly, hopefully,” said Eugenio Ambrosi, regional director
of the organization’s European regional office. “The machine is like a
diesel. It takes time to get it started.”The migrant crisis has been on
European front pages for several years. Before the crowds at the borders in the Balkans or at Greek ports, there was the steady stream of boats full of migrants arriving in Sicily; before that, there was the camp at Calais, in northern France, popularly known as “the jungle,” from where migrants try to cross the Channel to England.

Two
months ago, the French government finally announced a program to
relieve the pressure in Calais and move migrants to 70 reception centers
elsewhere in France.

Christian Salomé, who heads a local
charity, L’Auberge des Migrants, said it was too early to precisely
quantify the flow of people out of the Calais camp, but he estimated
that the population of the jungle had dropped to 5,000 from 6,000 since
October.

But resettling the migrants is not easy. According to
the newspaper Le Monde, of 23 migrants who were relocated in November
from Calais to a reception center in the city of Langres, about 180
miles southeast of Paris, only 15 remain, bored, unoccupied and
frustrated by bureaucracy.

Of those who left, some may have headed back to Calais, according to migrants interviewed by Le Monde.

“Whether
they stay at the centers depends on many factors — the quality of the
personnel, the human warmth that they find,” Mr. Salomé said in a
telephone interview.

For migrants who came to Calais in the hopes
of moving on to England, relocation to provincial towns in France is
probably not a long-term solution. Many will keep trying to reach
countries where they can expect a quicker response to their asylum
request, better hopes for a job or a chance to rejoin relatives.

According
to Mr. Ambrosi, migrants are well aware of the widely varying
approaches to handling asylum requests among European countries, as well
as the different chances of finding work. Not surprisingly, they go
where they feel they are most wanted.

“Each of the E.U. states
has its own policy, and its own mechanism, and the asylum seekers know
this situation very well,” he said.

Until the European Union
adopts a uniform policy on migration, he said, the burden on the
“welcoming” countries will increase, further straining tensions with
their more reluctant neighbors and among their own populations.

France, which has committed to accepting 30,000
of the 160,000 migrants from the “front-line” states of Greece and
Italy, has been trying to do its share, but the pace is slow: Some 900
migrants are expected to be formally settled here by the end of January,
according to the Ministry of the Interior.

Meanwhile, more
migrants are continuing to arrive in Europe, requiring additional
donations from the International Organization for Migration’s 162 member
countries. The organization has seen its operational budget for Greece
triple since 2014.

“We are advancing towards a more uniformed
response,” Mr. Ambrosi said. “We are going in the right direction, but
time is of the essence.”

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

4) Cleveland Officer Will Not Face Charges in Tamir Rice Shooting Death

CLEVELAND
— A grand jury declined on Monday to charge a Cleveland patrolman who
fatally shot a 12-year-old boy holding a pellet gun, capping more than a
year of investigation into a case that added to national outrage over
white officers killing African-Americans.In announcing the decision,
Timothy J. McGinty, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, said he had
recommended that the grand jurors not bring charges in the killing of
the boy, Tamir Rice, who was playing with the gun outside a recreation
center in November 2014.Mr. McGinty said the fatal encounter had been a
tragedy and a “perfect storm of human error, mistakes and
miscommunications.” But he said that enhancement of video from the scene
had made it “indisputable” that Tamir, who was black, was drawing the
pellet gun from his waistband when he was shot, either to hand it over
to the officers or to show them that it was not a real firearm. He said
that there was no reason for the officers to know that, and that the
officer who fired, Timothy Loehmann, had a reason to fear for his life.

The
case began when a caller to 911 said a male was pointing a gun at
people in a Cleveland park. The caller added that the gun was “probably
fake,” and that the person waving it was “probably a juvenile.” But
those caveats were not relayed to Officer Loehmann or his partner, Frank
Garmback, who was driving the patrol car. Officer Loehmann, who is
white, opened fire within seconds of arriving at the park. Officer
Garmback was also spared any charges.

The shooting in Cleveland
came just two days before a grand jury in Missouri declined to indict a
white police officer in Ferguson who fatally shot Michael Brown, an
unarmed black 18-year-old. The Ferguson case became one of a series of
police killings that drew protests — in New York, Baltimore, North
Charleston, S.C., and other cities — by demonstrators denouncing the way
the police treat African-Americans.

Though some officers have
been charged this year for on-duty killings, in cities including
Cincinnati and Baltimore, others have not. Mr. McGinty said that no
matter how tragic the circumstances involving Tamir’s death, the law
gives the benefit of the doubt to officers who must make split-second
decisions.

Tamir’s family and protesters had criticized the
approach of the prosecutor throughout the investigation, which took more
than 13 months. The Cleveland police initially investigated the case,
then the county sheriff’s office conducted its own inquiry. Mr.
McGinty’s office released the results of the sheriff’s investigation in
June, and months later presented the case to a grand jury.

“It
has been clear for months now that Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy
McGinty was abusing and manipulating the grand jury process to
orchestrate a vote against indictment,” lawyers for Tamir Rice’s family
said Monday in a statement. “Even though video shows the police shooting
Tamir in less than one second, Prosecutor McGinty hired so-called
expert witnesses to try to exonerate the officers and tell the grand
jury their conduct was reasonable and justified.”

City and state
officials urged calm. In a statement, Gov. John R. Kasich, a Republican
presidential candidate, said that he understood “how this decision will
leave many people asking themselves if justice was served,” but urged
residents not to “give in to anger and frustration and let it divide
us.”

A steady wind and cold rain Monday night drove away a small
group of demonstrators who had gathered at the park where Tamir was
fatally shot. Mementos were left at a makeshift memorial there
throughout the day, including dozens of teddy bears, plastic flowers and
small wooden crosses. The rain and wind extinguished candles that had
been lit in the boy’s memory.

At a news conference after the
prosecutor’s announcement, Mayor Frank Jackson expressed condolences to
the Rice family and said the city would begin an administrative review
of the shooting now that the grand jury’s work was finished. Mr. Jackson
said meaningful changes to the Division of Police had been made since
Tamir’s death, including efforts to give officers first-aid training and
provide basic medical kits in police cars.

“This has caused the
city of Cleveland, with the loss of a child at the hands of a police
officer, to do a lot of soul searching,” Mr. Jackson said. “And in the
midst of that soul searching we have made some changes.”

“All this is designed to better ensure that an incident like this will never happen again,” he added.

Police
Chief Calvin Williams said Officers Loehmann and Garmback would remain
on restricted duty until the administrative review was completed. He
said the review would look at whether department policies were violated
during the encounter, including the actions of the call taker and
dispatcher, the shooting itself, and the aftermath. “We’ll look at the
incident from start to finish,” Chief Williams said, and consider
discipline if violations are found.

As with many police killings
this year, outrage was sparked by what was caught on camera. Grainy
surveillance video, which circulated widely online, showed Officer
Garmback pulling the police cruiser within a few feet of Tamir and
Officer Loehmann stepping out of the car and almost immediately firing
his gun. Tamir died hours later.

Mr. McGinty noted that the
officers had never been told that the original caller suggested the gun
might be a fake. “Had the officers been aware of these qualifiers, the
training officer who was driving might have approached the scene with
less urgency,” said Mr. McGinty, who said the officers could not be
penalized for what they did not know. “Lives may not have been put at
stake.”

Matthew Meyer, an assistant prosecutor, said that it was
difficult to tell the difference between the pellet gun and a real one
because the orange safety tip was missing, and that the guns otherwise
look the same from a distance. Prosecutors also said that Tamir looked
large for his age, and that the neighborhood has a history of violence,
and that other officers have been killed nearby.

Mr. McGinty
said: “The death of Tamir Rice was an absolute tragedy. It was horrible,
unfortunate and regrettable. But it was not, by the law that binds us, a
crime.”

Mr. McGinty defended his decision to publicly release a
series of expert reports he commissioned before the grand jury
announcement, saying they made for a transparent process that allowed
the public to reach informed conclusions. Those reports found that
Officer Loehmann acted reasonably in shooting Tamir, but the Rice family
commissioned its own outside reports that reached the opposite
conclusion.

Mr. McGinty said he had called Tamir’s mother to tell
her of the grand jury’s actions and that it had been a “tough
conversation.” He said he “appreciated the sincere emotion and concern
of all citizens” but asked the community to “respect the process.” He
said Tamir’s family may yet find some redress in civil courts.

Some
people, however, were outraged. Representative Marcia Fudge, a Democrat
whose district includes part of Cleveland, said Monday that she
believed the grand jury process was a “miscarriage of justice” and that
Mr. McGinty should step down.

“I didn’t get all of the
information from the grand jury. They may have come up with the right
decision,” Ms. Fudge said. “But all of the process around it makes all
of us question the fairness. This is just outrageous that a case would
take that long.”Neither Officer Garmback nor Officer Loehmann has spoken
publicly about the shooting, though both men read statements to grand
jurors about their actions that day. Officer Loehmann told the grand
jury that he fired out of fear for his safety after Tamir reached into
his waistband and grabbed the pellet gun, which he believed to be real.

Tamir’s family has questioned Officer Loehmann’s account, and has sued the city and both officers in federal court.

Since
Tamir’s death, questions have been raised about Officer Loehmann’s
qualifications and about the Cleveland police’s standards on the use of
force. Records show that Officer Loehmann resigned from another Ohio
police department after a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms
training. The Cleveland police did not review that department’s
personnel file before offering him a job.

For years, the
Cleveland police have been criticized for being too aggressive in their
use of force, and for broader failures in management, record keeping and
training. In May, the city agreed to a sweeping consent decree with the
Justice Department that required changes in how officers use and report
force, and placed the police under the supervision of an independent
monitor.

Mr. McGinty presents evidence in all fatal police
encounters to a grand jury, but some activists have questioned the
fairness of the process, and have noted that indictments are generally
unlikely unless one is sought by a prosecutor.

In the Rice case,
family lawyers have said for months that they have little confidence
that Mr. McGinty wanted the officers charged. The lawyers have called
for a special prosecutor in the case and have asked the Justice
Department to investigate.

Justice Department officials said
Monday that they would “continue our independent review of this matter,
assess all available materials and determine what actions are
appropriate, given the strict burdens and requirements imposed by
applicable federal civil rights laws.”

Expecting protests in the days ahead, Cleveland officials said they were prepared to allow peaceful demonstrations.

“There
have already been plans for a response, both at an immediate level and a
long protracted struggle,” said the Rev. Jawanza Colvin, the pastor of a
Cleveland church who signed the affidavits this year seeking the
officers’ arrests.

But Mr. Colvin said Monday’s outcome had long been anticipated.

“The
fact that we are not surprised,” he said, “is in and of itself an
indictment of the culture of the criminal justice system.”

‘Star
Wars’ is a simple story, simply told, of good versus evil, light versus
darkness, and freedom versus tyranny. In other words it is the story of
America’s struggle to preserve democracy and civilization in a world
beset by evil and ‘evildoers’.

Movies and political propaganda
have long walked hand in hand. Indeed if ever a medium was suited to
propaganda it is the medium of cinema. And if ever an industry could be
credited with creating an alternate reality so pervasive it has managed
to convince generations of Americans and others around the world that up
is down, black is white, and left is right, that industry is Hollywood.

George Lucas, the creator of a Star Wars franchise which,
including this latest installment, has churned out seven movies since
the original appeared in 1977, is along with Steven Spielberg a child of
the reaction to the American counter-culture of the sixties and early
seventies.

Though both products of the sixties – a decade in
which culture and the arts, particularly cinema, was at the forefront of
resistance to the US military industrial complex – Lucas and Spielberg
came to prominence in the mid 1970s with movies which rather than attack
or question the establishment, instead embraced its role as both
protector and arbiter of the nation’s morals. The curtain began to come
down on the most culturally vital and exciting and cerebral period of
American cinema – responsible for producing such classics as ‘Bonnie and
Clyde’, ‘MASH’, ‘The Last Detail’, ‘The French Connection’, ‘The Wild
Bunch’, ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘Apocalypse Now’ – with Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’ in
1975, followed in 1977 by Lucas’s ‘Star Wars’. The former frightened
America, while the latter made it feel good about itself again.

Both
movies together spawned the high concept blockbuster, wherein audiences
were invited to feel rather than to think, allowing them to suspend
disbelief and escape reality instead of sharing the experience of
confronting it via stories in which alienated characters expressed the
angst, frustration, anger, and disaffection which they themselves were
experiencing in their own lives, thus inducing a sense of solidarity.

It
was the era of the anti-hero, main characters for whom the system and
conformity was the enemy, and who ploughed their own furrow regardless
of the consequences. The questioning of authority and its received
truths reflected a country whose young and not so young were hungry for
radical change. The war in Vietnam, Watergate, the black civil rights
and nationalist movements had shaken up American society and, with it,
its culture and cultural references.

But by the mid seventies,
with the end of the Vietnam War, and with the counter culture running
out of steam, the time had arrived to box up all that alienation, anger
and rebelliousness and allow the mythology of the American dream and
democracy to reassert its dominance.

In his peerless history of
this vital period of American cinema – ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’ –
author and cultural critic Peter Biskind writes:

“Beyond its impact on movie marketing and merchandising,
Star Wars had a profound effect on the culture. It benefited from the
retrenchment of the Carter [President Jimmy Carter] years, the march to
the center that followed the end of the Vietnam War.”

This march to the center became a march to the right under Reagan,
which manifested in Hollywood as artistic and cultural stagnation,
wherein directors such as Spielberg and Lucas became less concerned with
story and character and more focused on spectacle. Bigger, louder and
richer was the mantra as two dimensional characters and plotlines that
your average ten year old with a set of crayons and an imagination could
come up with predominated.
Biskind writes:

“Lucas knew that genres and cinematic conventions depend
on consensus, the web of shared assumptions that had been sundered in
the ‘60s. He was recreating and reaffirming these values, and Star Wars,
with its Manichean moral fundamentalism, its white hats and black hats,
restored the luster to threadbare values like heroism and
individualism.”

In this latest Star Wars movie, directed
by J J Abrams, Lucas makes do with a writing credit after selling the
franchise to Disney in 2012 for $4.05 billion. Yes you read that right;
he sold it for $4.05 billion. That kind of money will buy you a lot of
light sabres.

Disney and Abrams have reached back in time in
order to refresh the franchise, returning it to its roots with the
return of Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), Luke
Skywalker (Mark Hamill), and the old iconic favourites Chewbacca and
R2D2. For Star Wars buffs there’s even the return of Han Solo’s iconic
spaceship the Millennium Falcon. The movie’s antagonist, its Darth
Vader, is named Kylo Ren, played by Vladimir Putin…sorry Adam Driver.
With this character lies the one interesting twist in the plot. Mind,
having said that, we’re talking ‘interesting’ relative to the rest of
the plot. We’re not talking Roman Polanski and ‘Chinatown’ here.

There
are also major roles in the movie for two relative unknowns, both
British: Rey, through whose eyes the narrative unfolds, is played by
Daisy Ridley, while Finn is played by John Boyega.

For all the
hype surrounding its release, and the rave reviews it has garnered, the
latest instalment of the long running and inordinately successful Star
Wars franchise – ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ – is so embarrassingly
and toe-curlingly clichéd it’s impossible to walk out afterwards without
limping.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the movie is not
the battle of good versus evil it portrays but the fact that Harrison
Ford was reportedly paid 76 times more than newcomer Daisy Ridley to
star in it. The 73 year old’s financial package comprised an upfront fee
in the region of $20 million plus 0.5 percent of the movie’s gross
earnings, which are projected to reach a whopping $1.9 billion.

It
is proof that the story of America is not good versus evil or light
versus darkness at all. It is instead the story of the super rich versus
everybody else.

John Wight is the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent Hollywood memoir – Dreams That Die –
published by Zero Books. He’s also written five novels, which are
available as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

6) Alarm Spreads in Brazil Over a Virus and a Surge in Malformed Infants

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — A little-known virus spread by mosquitoes is causing one of the most alarming health crises to hit Brazil
in decades, officials here warn: thousands of cases of brain damage, in
which babies are born with unusually small heads.Many pregnant women
across Brazil are in a panic. The government, under withering criticism
for not acting sooner, is urging them to take every precaution to avoid
mosquito bites. One official even suggested that women living in areas
where mosquitoes are especially prevalent postpone having children.

“If
she can wait, then she should,” said Claudio Maierovitch, director of
the department of surveillance of communicable diseases at Brazil’s
health ministry.

The alarm stems from a huge surge in babies with microcephaly
(my-kroh-SEF-uh-lee), a rare, incurable condition in which their heads
are abnormally small. Brazilian officials have registered at least 2,782
cases this year, compared with just 147 in 2014 and 167 the year
before.At least 40 of the infants have recently died, and some Brazilian
researchers warn that cases could multiply in the months ahead. Those
babies who survive may face impaired intellectual development for the
rest of their lives.

Brazilian researchers say that an obscure mosquito-borne virus that made its way to the country only recently — Zika — is to blame for the sudden increase in brain damage among infants.

But
other virologists caution that more testing is needed to prove the
dangerous link between the virus and brain damage, leaving the full
extent of the threat to the country, and the hemisphere, unclear.

“Why
this may have happened in Brazil and not elsewhere is at this stage
difficult to answer,” said Alain Kohl, a virologist at the University of
Glasgow who studies Zika.

“Perhaps it was never properly
registered in other areas, or the situation in Brazil is indeed
different,” he added, citing the possibility that the link between Zika
and microcephaly could be related to particular strains of the virus.

The Zika virus has already reached several countries in Latin America, including Mexico, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
warns that it could spread in parts of the United States as well. There
have already been cases diagnosed in the United States, in travelers
who visited affected countries, and the C.D.C. expects these instances
to increase.

“I cried for a month when I learned how God is
testing us,” said Gleyse Kelly da Silva, 27, a toll road attendant in
the city of Recife in northeast Brazil, describing how an ultrasound exam had detected microcephaly in the seventh month of her pregnancy with her daughter, Maria Giovanna, born in October.

Just a few months earlier, Ms. da Silva had sought medical attention after experiencing some of Zika’s symptoms: fever, joint pain and a red rash.

“I
had never heard of Zika or microcephaly,” said Ms. da Silva, the mother
of three other children. “Now I just pray that my daughter can endure
life with this misfortune.”

No one knows precisely when the Zika virus made the leap to Brazil from its place of origin
in Africa. Some researchers say it could have arrived during the 2014
World Cup, when Brazil welcomed travelers from around the globe. Others
think the virus may have come during a canoe race weeks later, when paddlers from French Polynesia, the site of a recent Zika outbreak, arrived in Rio de Janeiro.

Researchers,
alert to the rapid increase in cases, say that Zika’s spread to Brazil
reflects how easily viruses are jumping from one part of the planet to
another.

They are particularly worried that the disease is
wreaking havoc in a region where the population has not encountered it
before, and that climate change may be allowing viruses like Zika to thrive in new domains.

The
Brazilian government has stopped short of officially advising women not
to get pregnant, but confusion and fear are spreading along with the
virus.

“The situation is incredibly frightening,” said Andreza
Mireli Silva, 22, a worker in a shoe factory in Sergipe State in
northeast Brazil who is seven months pregnant. She said she was trying
to avoid mosquito bites by wearing long pants despite the heat of the
Southern Hemisphere summer and applying insect repellent every three
hours.

Zika, named for the forest in Uganda where scientists
discovered it in the 1940s, often goes unnoticed in the people it
infects and was not considered especially life-threatening before
spreading to Brazil. But the advance of the virus here is focusing
scrutiny on the resilience of a worrisome pest: Aedes aegypti, the
mosquito that carries Zika and other diseases, among them yellow fever and chikungunya.

“Brazil
offers the ideal conditions for Zika to spread so quickly,” said Ana
Maria Bispo de Filippis, a leader of the research team that has linked
Zika to microcephaly. The country, she added, has “a susceptible
population in which the majority of people never had contact with the
disease.”

Before Zika’s arrival, Brazil was already grappling
with a much deadlier epidemic of dengue, another virus transmitted by
Aedes mosquitoes. Brazil had nearly 1.6 million cases of dengue in 2015,
according to estimates from the health ministry, up from 569,000 in
2014. At least 839 people have died from dengue in Brazil this year, an
80 percent increase from the previous year. Some health officials say
that changes in weather and rainfall may be behind the surge.

Brazil waged war
on the Aedes aegypti mosquito for decades during the 20th century
before a vaccine was developed for yellow fever. Health agents deployed
across the country to destroy habitats like water barrels and other open
water sources where the mosquitoes thrive. The authorities even
declared victory against the pest in 1955.

But the mosquito
re-emerged in Brazil in the late 1960s, outpacing eradication campaigns.
Now, at a time when President Dilma Rousseff’s beleaguered government
is under fire over corruption, an economic crisis and its handling of
the surge in dengue cases, the spread of Zika is unleashing even more
criticism.

After virologists identified a Zika outbreak in May in
northeast Brazil, the health minister at the time, Arthur Chioro,
played down the discovery.

After that dismissive response, public health experts say that the political upheaval
in Brazil — in which Ms. Rousseff is fighting impeachment proceedings —
weakened efforts to respond to Zika. Ms. Rousseff overhauled her
cabinet in October, dismissing various ministers from her own Workers
Party, including Mr. Chioro.

In doing so, she ceded more power to
the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or P.M.D.B., which
controls both houses of Congress. While Zika was raging, she named as
her health minister Marcelo Castro, a psychiatrist from that party who
stopped practicing medicine years ago to focus on his own business
interests and politics.

“The health minister, a politician
dedicated to the business of ranching, has a profile that’s the opposite
of what’s required to lead the effort to deal with microcephaly,” Ligia
Bahia, a specialist on Brazil’s public health system at the Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro, said in a column in the newspaper O Globo.

Researchers
warn that they are only just starting to understand Zika’s impact on
Brazil and the potential for it to spread t other countries in the
Americas. The federal authorities do not yet have a precise estimate on
the number of Zika cases because reporting such figures is not
compulsory.

Some researchers emphasize the role that climate
change may play in Zika’s spread. As temperatures increase in some
areas, they argue, mosquitoes can multiply more quickly, potentially
enhancing their collective ability to transmit diseases.

Additionally,
increased precipitation in some areas creates places where mosquitoes
can breed. And droughts, like those that recently afflicted parts of
Brazil, can cause people to hoard water in containers, providing
additional mosquito habitats.

“The mosquito is exquisitely
adapted to human hosts, living in close proximity to humans and feeding
repeatedly,” said Maria Diuk-Wasser, a scholar at Columbia University.

Neither
the Zika outbreak in Latin America nor its possible link to
microcephaly in infants has led to changes in travel advice from the
C.D.C. or the Pan-American Health Organization, the regional office of
the World Health Organization.

Because Zika is spread by the same
mosquito species linked to dengue and chikungunya, both agencies are
sticking with the advice they gave for those outbreaks: that all
travelers, including pregnant women, do everything they can to avoid
mosquito bites, like using insect repellent day and night, wearing long
pants and long sleeves, and staying in places that are screened and
air-conditioned.

Paula Moura contributed reporting from São
Paulo, and Vinod Sreeharsha from Rio de Janeiro. Donald G. McNeil Jr.
contributed from New York

What
was once a rarity has now become increasingly common: police officers
facing criminal charges in the deaths of civilians. In Albuquerque, two
officers will stand trial in the death of a homeless man. In Cincinnati, a campus police officer has been charged in the fatal shooting of a man during a traffic stop. In Chicago, where a video captured the death of Laquan McDonald at the hands of the police, an officer was charged with murder.

But
even as high-profile police shootings have attracted more scrutiny over
the past year, one thing remains clear: The law gives the police the
benefit of the doubt.

That was the case on Monday, when a grand jury declined to indict two Cleveland police officers in the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

The
local prosecutor said the shooting of the boy as he played with a toy
gun in a park was tragic but not criminal.The prosecutor, Timothy J.
McGinty, outlined his reasoning in a 70-page report
that catalogs the many legal obstacles to bringing criminal charges
against an officer. Though the Rice family and others criticized the
report as biased toward law enforcement, many experts agreed that the
law was on his side when he recommended against indictment.

And
even as the number of police officers facing charges has notably risen,
driven by video evidence and a national debate over law enforcement
tactics, convictions have proved as elusive as ever.

In November, a Pennsylvania jury acquitted Officer Lisa Mearkle, who shot an unarmed man
in the back after he fled a traffic stop for an expired inspection
sticker. In December, a jury deadlocked in the trial of the first of six
Baltimore police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray. The judge declared a mistrial.

Such
legal realities leave a wide gap between an unnecessary police shooting
and a criminal one, a gap that, barring a new Supreme Court ruling on
police use of force, must be filled by better policies, training,
accountability and supervision, experts say.

“These are important
policy discussions that need to be addressed,” said Philip M. Stinson, a
criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio
and a former police officer. “We have a problem with police subculture.
We have a problem with poor training, lack of training. Many police
departments have cut in-service training because of budget cuts. Many
departments used to send everybody every month, but now they don’t have
the money to do that.”

Despite heavy sanctions, like millions
paid out in settlements over police mistakes, police departments have
resisted change, Mr. Stinson said. “But it’s gotten to the point now
where people of all walks of life are paying attention. We’ve gotten to a
tipping point.”

William Johnson, the executive director of the
National Association of Police Organizations, had a broader view of how
to bridge the gap.

“The anger on the part of protesters is
misguided if it’s focused on the grand jury,” he said. “If they want
change, what they need to look at is training, on the part of officers,
but also training on the part of the community to understand how the
criminal justice system does work. And also in, I don’t know how to put
it, but common sense on the part of the public.”

He pointed out that Tamir Rice had a realistic-looking toy gun, and that in the shooting of Michael Brown
in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, forensic evidence supported the police
officer’s account that Mr. Brown had gone for the officer’s gun during a
scuffle. Later that year, a grand jury declined to indict that officer,
Darren Wilson, and shortly afterward, Daniel Pantaleo, the officer
whose chokehold caused the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, also was not indicted by a grand jury.

This
year, 18 police officers were charged in fatal on-duty shootings,
compared with an average of fewer than five a year over the preceding
decade, according to Mr. Stinson’s research. That does not include the
six officers indicted in the nonshooting death of Mr. Gray. Of the 18,
11 of the cases involved some sort of video evidence, Mr. Stinson said,
adding, “In some of these cases, I don’t think the officers would have
been charged without it.”

The new zeal to indict officers is far from universal. In Florida, it has been more than two decades since an officer was indicted on a charge of using deadly force. In Houston, an investigation by The Houston Chronicle found that the last officer charged in a shooting was in 2004.

Even
with indictments, juries will remain reluctant to convict police
officers absent evidence of malice, said Eugene O’Donnell, a former
officer and prosecutor who now teaches at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice in New York. “Tremendous incompetence, the worst kind
of training, disregard for people is really not enough,” he said.
“You’re going to have to go beyond that because the police are
different.”

Some jurors in police cases have later made a
distinction between determining whether the officer should have fired
and deciding — as the law instructs — whether the officer could
reasonably have feared bodily harm. In the case of Officer Mearkle in
Pennsylvania, the victim lay on the ground as ordered, but did not keep
his hands in full view, a video of the shooting shows.

But
convictions or no, Professor O’Donnell said, the intense scrutiny
brought on by a wave of activism after the shooting of Mr. Brown,
followed by this year’s string of indictments, has caused “seismic
changes” in policing.

“You can absolutely be sure there’s an
impact on the everyday work the police do,” he said. “This is reminding
the police that they should only be using deadly force as a last
resort.”

“It’s an imperfect way to fix the system, the
criminalization of people,” he added. “In a way, we’re doing bottom-up
reform instead of top-down reform. We’re finding egregious endings and
working from there instead of proactively saying the police system is
part of the criminal justice system and consequently is broken. The
political sector hopes that the conversation will end there, at the
bottom or close to the bottom.”

Cleveland recently agreed to
overhaul its police department after a Department of Justice
investigation found a pattern and practice of excessive force. The
department now places a first aid kit in every squad car and offers
first aid training. Tamir lay unaided by the police for several minutes
after he was shot.

But at a news conference Tuesday, Mayor Frank
Jackson and Police Chief Calvin Williams spoke not of policy changes,
but of a top-to-bottom review of the Rice shooting to determine whether
and how much to discipline the two officers, the 911 operator and the
dispatcher. The 911 caller who reported the gun said that it might be a
toy and that the suspect was probably a child, but that information was
not relayed to the officers.

“If the facts show that there was
wrongdoing on the part of the officers, procedurally, policy-wise, we
will take care of that,” Chief Williams said. “If those facts don’t bear
that out, it will go that way.”

Mr. Jackson declined to comment
on the grand jury’s decision, but said repeatedly that the public had
lost confidence in the justice system.

“There is what they
believe to be a lack of fairness, a lack of justice in the system and
the way in which it prosecutes or reviews these kinds of cases,” he
said. “And people are very upset about it. And I believe legitimately
and rightly so.”

IF
you are black, you’re far more likely to see your electricity cut, more
likely to be sued over a debt, and more likely to land in jail because
of a parking ticket.It is not unreasonable to attribute these perils to
discrimination. But there’s no question that the main reason small
financial problems can have such a disproportionate effect on black
families is that, for largely historical reasons rooted in racism, they
have far smaller financial reserves to fall back on than white families.

The
most recent federal survey in 2013 put the difference in net worth
between the typical white and black family at $131,000. That’s a big
number, but here’s an even more troubling statistic: About one-quarter
of African-American families had less than $5 in reserve. Low-income whites had about $375.

Any
setback, from a medical emergency to the unexpected loss of hours at
work, can be devastating. It means that harsh punishments for the
failure to pay small debts harm black families inordinately. Sometimes,
the consequence is jail. Other times, electricity is cut, or wages
garnished.

The modern roots of the racial wealth gap can be
traced back to the post-World War II housing boom, when federal agencies
blocked loans to black Americans, locking them out of the greatest
wealth accumulation this country has ever experienced. More recently,
the bursting of the housing bubble and subsequent recession slammed
minorities. In 2013, the median wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households, the widest gap since 1989.

Earlier
this year, my colleague Annie Waldman and I took a close look at
debt-collection lawsuits in three major American cities. We expected to
see a pattern driven by income, with collectors and credit card lenders
suing people most often in lower-income areas.

But income was just half the story. Even accounting for income, the rate of court judgments from these lawsuits was twice as high in mostly black communities as it was in mostly white ones.
In some neighborhoods in Newark and St. Louis, we found more than one
judgment for every four residents over a five-year period. Many were
families who, knocked off their feet by medical bills or job loss or
other problems, had simply been unable to recover.

When debts
turn into court judgments, plaintiffs gain the power to collect by
cleaning out bank accounts and seizing wages. Federal and state laws
generally don’t protect anyone but the poorest debtors, and because
judgments are valid for a decade or more, the threat of garnishment can
linger for years. The paycheck from that new job may suddenly be slashed
and savings may disappear.

Sometimes the consequence of not
having the money to pay a bill is immediate: The power goes out. In a
2009 national survey of lower-income households by the federal Energy
Information Administration, 9 percent of blacks reported having their
electricity disconnected in the previous year because they had been
unable to pay. For whites, the number was less than 4 percent, according
to an analysis of the survey by the National Consumer Law Center.

And
sometimes the consequence of unmanageable debt is to fall further into
debt. In a 2013 Federal Reserve survey, about three times as many blacks
reported taking out a high-interest payday loan in the previous year as
did whites at the same income level. Desperate consumers turn to these
loans as a way to catch up on bills, but often get tripped up by
unaffordable interest payments.

When combined with discriminatory
policing practices, the effect of the asset gap is to magnify the
racial disparity. In its report on the Ferguson, Mo., Police Department,
the Justice Department found that officers disproportionately stopped
and ticketed black citizens. For a “manner of walking” violation, it was
$302; for “high grass and weeds,” $531.

Blacks accounted for
about 67 percent of Ferguson’s population and around 85 percent of the
municipal court cases. But the numbers were even more lopsided when it
came to the harshest consequences. Blacks accounted for 92 percent of
the cases where an arrest warrant had been issued to compel payment.

And
this wasn’t a problem only in Ferguson. Earlier this year, the American
Civil Liberties Union sued DeKalb County, Ga., which includes part of
Atlanta, for jailing citizens over unpaid court fines and unpaid fees
charged by a for-profit company that runs probation services for the
government. About 55 percent of DeKalb County’s population is black, but
the A.C.L.U. found that nearly all probationers jailed for failure to
pay those fines and fees were black.

The racial wealth gap
“creates this cyclical effect,” said Nusrat Choudhury, an A.C.L.U.
attorney. An unpaid speeding ticket may result in a suspended driver’s
license, which may lead to a more severe violation. Unable to pay their
fines, black defendants become more crushingly entangled in debt.

Cori Winfield, a single mother in St. Louis, got caught up in this cycle.

After
she was unable to keep up the payments on a subprime auto loan she took
out in 2009, the car was repossessed the next year, but the
consequences didn’t stop there. Because the debt continued to be bloated
by interest charges, the lender began garnishing her wages in 2012. The
garnishment continues today. Because she was unable to repay, she will
end up paying far more than she owed in the first place.Making matters
worse for Ms. Winfield, while her wages were being garnished, she was
arrested for driving with a license that had been suspended because she
had failed to pay a speeding ticket. She ended up spending a weekend in
jail and having to pay the cost of bail.

Ms. Winfield has a
decent clerical job, earning about $30,000 a year. But she lives month
to month. When hit with an unexpected expense, she is left reeling.

Her vulnerability is typical. In a recent survey by the Pew Charitable Trusts,
the typical black household earning between $25,000 and $50,000
reported having emergency savings of $400. The typical white household
in that range had $2,100.

Black families were much more likely to
report difficulty in recovering from a financial setback or to have
fallen behind on a bill in the past year. This financial insecurity
extended up the income scale. Of black households with income between
$50,000 and $85,000, 30 percent said they had been unable to pay a bill.
By contrast, only white households with incomes below $25,000 reported
similar trouble paying bills; 31 percent said they had fallen behind.

What
can be done? The best place to start is by identifying practices that
are particularly damaging to black communities, and then fixing them.

In Missouri, for example, the attorney general recently proposed a series of reforms
for debt-collection lawsuits to ensure that the underlying debt was
valid and that lawyers’ fees were not excessive. Collection-industry
trade groups supported the proposal.

Lawmakers in Missouri and other states could go further
and reduce the amount of income subject to garnishment. In most states
(New York and New Jersey are exceptions), defendants can lose a quarter
of their post-tax income, a big hit for even middle-income families.

Bank
accounts are afforded even less protection, allowing collectors to
seize funds without limit. It’s a nonsensical system that restricts how
much of a worker’s paycheck a collector can seize, but allows collectors
to take the entire amount once that check is deposited. Setting even a
small dollar amount as automatically off limits to collectors would be a
substantial improvement.

Changes like that benefit everyone, but
they particularly help black families. Policy makers should pay
attention. Making it easier to recover from small setbacks can make a
big difference in people’s lives.

Paul Kiel is a consumer finance reporter for ProPublica. This is part of its series on debt collection.

MORE than 57,000 New Yorkers will sleep in a shelter tonight. In this city of glistening wealth, they lack a permanent place to call home. Thousands more suffer outside the shelter system; they are on the streets, bracing for the bitter cold ahead.

Many in the system are women and children — families comprise two-thirds of those in shelters. Nine of 10 homeless families are led by women, many of whom have fled domestic violence. Nearly a third of these women are employed. But their low-wage jobs leave them unable to afford the city’s skyrocketing rents.

At Win, the nonprofit I lead, we serve the women and children who are the forgotten face of homelessness in New York. They are mothers and grandmothers and aunts and sisters. They work long hours and make sacrifices few of us can fathom, all to give their children and grandchildren a chance to tap the well of dignity inside each of us and break the cycle of homelessness. They are our neighbors, our fellow New Yorkers. Yet, all too often, we fall short of treating and housing New York’s homeless thoughtfully and with care.

Three weeks ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a 90-day comprehensive review of city services for the homeless, and a laudable new initiative, Home-Stat, to combat street homelessness. This is an important step to address some of the most visible manifestations of our homelessness crisis. But more is needed.

New York has a different agency or office that focuses on just about every challenge homeless families face. Yet little is done to coordinate these services toward the goal of providing permanent housing.

Nearly all of those in our shelters are eligible for city-funded housing vouchers. But the agency that oversees cash assistance, which includes vouchers, and job-readiness efforts, the Human Resources Administration, is not the one in charge of shelters. Shelters are instead run by the Department of Homeless Services.

We need to combine those two agencies. Until the mid-1990s, services for the homeless were under the purview of the human resources commissioner, and they should be again. This change would be a recognition that homelessness is not an isolated problem; it interacts with, and is a consequence of, a maelstrom of factors — unaffordable rents, insufficient job training, lack of accessible child care, untreated mental illness and substance abuse, and too few stable work opportunities.

Our current shelter system is a hodgepodge of repurposed manufacturing sites and rickety apartment buildings. In the past 20 years, only one new shelter in the system — Win’s facility on Glenwood Road in Brooklyn — has been built with families in mind. We need to reimagine our shelters — and, yes, open new ones — so that they can offer the holistic services that are critical to equipping homeless families with the skills and treatment they need.

Shelters should have free on-site G.E.D. preparation classes and exams. They should offer vocational training programs and job placement support, targeting growth industries where well-paying jobs are most likely to be available. The city could further help by partnering with companies and labor unions to create paths to economic security.

Some of these shelters should be built under the same roof as permanent housing and community spaces, to provide a continuum of care and a connection with the neighborhood as well as to leverage existing community resources.

Opening new shelters will put thousands of affordable apartments back on the market. For years, the city has rented apartments and even paid for hotel rooms as temporary shelter units. These apartments and hotel rooms are scattered throughout the city, leaving the homeless without on-site access to support services. The city pays landlords more than someone with a rental voucher can pay, which only exacerbates New York’s already severe housing shortage. More than 3,000 homeless families are housed in apartments that could be permanent homes.

Adding quality, integrated shelter capacity and forcing landlords to put up “for rent” signs on these scattered apartments will make more units affordable to working families. This should be a core piece of the mayor’s aggressive housing plan.

Another critical focus area is the aftercare services that help families move from shelters to permanent housing. The city has an effective model in Brooklyn, Home to Stay, which provides customized care that gradually decreases in intensity as families become more independent. It should be scaled citywide.

We need to learn from what works — and eliminate what does not, including a web of rules, regulations and laws that run counter to the interests of the homeless. For example, domestic violence survivors who seek refuge in an emergency shelter should not be uprooted and moved elsewhere after 180 days. This counterproductive policy makes no sense. We should change it.

Homelessness is among our city’s most daunting challenges, but it is not intractable. To work with homeless women and children is to be inspired by the grit of mothers who strive daily to improve their kids’ circumstances.

They will never accept that better is impossible. Neither can we.

Christine C. Quinn is president and chief executive officer of Win (formerly Women in Need).